June 16, 2008

The Biofuel Papers

This entry is intended to serve as an index to the three papers I’ve written on the topic of biofuels, and in particular how to derive a payback period for a biofuel crop. Such a consideration inevitably suggests that growing biofuels on a given plot of land is a bad idea. It’s just a question of how long there’s going to more global warming for if you grow biofuels than if you don’t – centuries in many cases.

[…] to more GHG emissions if it is then grown in areas of virgin forest. At this point I realised that my arguments about biofuels may be going over people’s heads. Not because it’s such a high-falutin’ line of reasoning. […]

[…] terms of how long it would take to pay off the carbon debt from clearing the land. As I argued in the Biofuel Papers – sigh! – this is only part of the story. The Beeb notes that: “On a positive note, the […]

[…] But what stuck in my notebook from Deepak’s talk was a point he made about biofuel from Indonesian palm oil. A peer-reviewed paper, he said, had determined that clearing the land to grow the oil palms would incur a “carbon debt” that would take up to 840 years to pay off. My ears pricked up. This sounded very like the “pay-back period” concept I came up with in 2007, and documented in three papers. […]